| Summary |
Wei-Jen Wu, 2008.07
Department of Transportation Technology and Management National Chiao Tung University
The ability to match aircraft cabin service to dynamic market changes is one of the crucial factors deciding the profitability of an airline. There exist business travelers who prefer and are able to afford the high fare of luxurious first-class cabin as well as tourism travelers seeking for cheap air tickets due to budget limits. The cabin-class choice from different travelers and trip purpose on the route determine seat utilization, thereby the revenue and total cost of the airline. Because of the limited cabin floor area, there is a trade-off among cabin class number, the size, and the amount of the seat of different classes. The expected revenue of an airline is influenced by the passenger market characteristics and the aircraft cabin interior design. Though large aircraft is flexible in cabin interior design, the airline must explore the growth rate of routes, changes in market composition and passenger demand when assigning the fleet to each route. A profit-maximizing airline must investigate the impacts of dynamic economic changes and trip purpose compositions of various origin-destination (OD) pairs on the cabin seat allocation and trade-off between costs of providing the service and the revenue accordingly generated from different cabin seat allocation.
This study aims to explore the interior design problem of aircraft cabin from a long-term perspective. On the demand side, this study applies grey forecasting model to predict the demand of each class for each year. On the supply side, the study considers the airline operating cost as related to fleet planning, cabin seat allocation and utilization. A mathematical programming model is further formulated to determine the optimal fleet planning and cabin interior design including the number of cabin classes, the size, and the number of seats for each class. The objective function aims to maximize the total profit of a given airline taking demand-supply interactions into account.
Finally, a case study is provided to illustrate the results and the application of the model. The results show that a new aircraft tends to operate only on a single route for most of service period, and the main factor which significantly affects the decisions on allocating seats for different classes of cabin is the trade-off between the size of the area allocated for and expected profit generated from each class. The results of the model illustrate an integrated solution associated with airline fleet management and cabin design in a dynamic and competitive environment. |
